Edmontonians are waking up to a slightly different city council this morning – one that (thankfully) appears less committed to Mayor Don Iveson’s “progressive” agenda.

Iveson is even more strongly entrenched in the mayor’s chair than before Monday’s vote, but he is facing a council that may be slightly less of a push over for his LRT, bike lane, infill, “green” agenda.

The change is not ideological so much as it’s regional.

The north side feels underappreciated and it’s not going to take it anymore.

Incumbent Dave Loken was defeated while incumbent Tony Caterina barely held on in a close fight.

Loken, a left-of-centre councillor lost to Jon Dziadyk, an urban planner and former military officer who ran on a platform that leaned right. Meanwhile, right-of-centre councillor Tony Caterina avoided a close call to left-leaning challenger and social worker Kris Andreychuk.

While Dziadyk and Andreychuk were coming at the incumbents from opposite ends of the spectrum, they shared one common theme: The fast-growing north end was largely ignored by the incumbent council that had obsessed on downtown bike lanes, southeast and west end LRT and infill.

None of those issues has much impact on the northern third of our city. North end voters seemed to buy into the message that they are overtaxed and underserved.Dziadyk’s slogan was “low taxes, smarter choices and less downtown spending.”

The only north end councillor to be re-elected comfortably was Ward 2’s Bev Esslinger.

Similarly, Tony Caterina’s son Rocco lost the open race in Ward 4 to failed federal New Democrat candidate Aaron Paquette because Paquette seemed to do a superior job of plugging into the northern discontent.

Once he is sworn in, the very left-leaning Paquette will likely be a reliable vote for Mayor Don Iveson’s push for fashionable “progressive” west end LRT extension, “green” infrastructure in the white-elephant Blatchford development, walkable neighbourhoods, densification and social housing.

But he and the other northern councillors will also have to keep in mind that the north end wants to be paid attention to – more.

In the west end in Ward 5, there will be little change. Stephen Mandel-clone Sarah Hamilton won, so even though residents expressed strong dislike for LRT and infill, Hamilton will likely continue to push for both of those Mandel-Iveson priorities.

One of the more interesting new councillors (because he is less predictable and harder to pigeonhole) is Ward 9’s Tim Cartmell.

Cartmell likes bike lanes, but not carved out of vehicle lanes. (Smart.) And he prefers bus rapid transit first, before LRT.

Of course, the mayor is back in office with an even bigger mandate than in 2013 (73 per cent this time versus 62 per cent), but he has a council that is likely to be less cooperative than the last one.

By my count, he has one less councillor whose blind support he can count on then he has had the past four years.

That’s probably a good thing for local democracy.

The previous council had grown out of touch with voters. This election showed that. Indeed, the results are a moderate rebuke of that.

Edmontonians, for instance, may still be split on LRT, but they for sure don’t see the sense of building expensive bike lanes that add to congestion and will be little used during our four or five winter months.

Even those councillors who were comfortably returned, as well as the mayor, have to stop their obsessive push to remake Edmonton into an environmental, socially engineered, “progressive” paradise and spend more time concentrating on practical problems and solutions.